Over a century ago, the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre could
lament that history "celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our
death, [but] it scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we
thrive; it knows the names of the kings' bastards, [but] it cannot tell
us the origin of wheat" (The
Life of the Caterpillar;
Dodd, Mead and Company, Inc., 1916). Nowadays, however, humanistic food
scholarship is so pervasive that one may legitimately worry about an
imminent dearth of alternative food movements, pastoralist
countercultures, terroir traditions and heirloom varieties left to
investigate.

One remaining opportunity for meaningful research, Durham University
geographer Peter Atkins notes in the preface to
Animal Cities: Beastly Urban Histories,
is the past significance and eventual disappearance of urban livestock
and especially the "extraordinary animal-intense districts" of large
nineteenth century European and North American cities (p. 105). Building
on a session convened at the 2006 European Urban History Association
meeting, this collection of essays points the way forward by discussing
topics such as urban animal numbers and types, the various nuisances and
health problems they caused, the wide range of industries they
sustained, and the reasons underlying their gradual removal from
locations such as Paris, Edinburgh, Perth and Melbourne. (The book also
contains two chapters on the London zoo and dog walking in Victorian and
Edwardian England that tread on more familiar intellectual ground.)

Over forty percent of the book was penned by Atkins, whose nearly four
decades of scholarship on the topic can be traced back to his doctoral
dissertation on the historical geography of the London milk trade. Using
once again the British metropolis as his primary case study, he
discusses problems ranging from the safety issues caused by large
cattle, sheep and poultry drives in urban streets to zoonotic diseases.
Apart from food, clothing and transportation, he reminds us, urban
livestock provided a wide range of non-edible inputs to a cluster of
dirty and smelly industries that included soap, glue, candle,
fertilizer, comb, saddle, glove, and industrial belt makers. Urban
(mostly horse) manure was also once the primary fertilizer used in peri-urban
market gardens, fields, and pastures, which in turn provided much of the
sustenance of nearby humans and livestock. While Atkins has previously
written on some of these issues, his contribution incorporates much
recent scholarship and additional thoughts and insights.

One of the most commendable aspects of Animal Cities is its
minimal use of academic jargon. Unfortunately, its hefty price will keep
it out of the hands of the increasingly large lay audience with a
growing appetite for food history. Among academics, it will appeal
primarily to urban and environmental historians, historical geographers,
and the more down-to-earth "animal geographies" theorists. Proponents of
urban agriculture as a community development strategy would especially
benefit from familiarizing themselves with the book's content, for
although the authors are supportive of this approach, their evidence is
not.

For instance, they remind us that once ubiquitous chicken coops
eventually disappeared from urban backyards not only because of public
health (from salmonella to zoonotic diseases) and nuisance (from smell
to their propensity to attract rats) concerns, but also because the
advent of more productive agribusiness and new work and leisure
opportunities for urban dwellers meant that most people were no longer
willing to spend a portion of their time producing food at a loss.
Indeed, several North American cities already struggle with hundreds of
abandoned urban chickens because their previous hipster owners were both
overwhelmed by the amount of care they required and disappointed by the
fact that they only lay eggs for two years (Sarah Boesveld, "Hipster
farmers abandoning urban chickens because they're too much work,"
National Post, 9 July 2013).

“Several North American cities
already struggle with hundreds of abandoned urban chickens
because their previous hipster owners were both overwhelmed
by the amount of care they required and disappointed by the
fact that they only lay eggs for two years.”

Also relevant for SPIN (Small Plot Intensive) enthusiasts is that the
once greater productivity of peri-urban food production systems over
their rural counterparts owed much not only to more intensive production
practices (greenhouses, cloches, wind-breaking walls, large and
specialized labor pool), but paradoxically to the much larger volumes of
manure available in cities than in the countryside―a fact explained by
the large volumes of animal feed imported from distant locations. Yet
even before the end of the nineteenth century, the advent of superior
fertilizers such as Peruvian guano and Chilean nitrates, more desirable
employment opportunities for urban agricultural laborers, and new
transportation (steamship and railroad) and preservation (refrigeration)
technologies had essentially eliminated the economic foundations of
urban SPIN. In the end, proximity to consumers and ever more abundant
and cheaper horse manure (which in time became an unmitigated nuisance)
simply could not overcome natural advantages and economies of scale in
more distant locations. If anything, things are now probably worse in
this respect than they have ever been.

Unfortunately, the contributors to Animal Cities only
begrudgingly draw what would seem unavoidable conclusions as to the
importance of economic forces (as distinct from public health
considerations) in removing livestock from urban environments. For
instance, after observing that in many parts of the world today "fresh
animal food production in urban settings is not only tolerated but
actively encouraged," Atkins goes out of his way to point out that he
"is not trying here to claim that there are strong parallels between
British Victorian cities and the Third World today. But the mismatch of
'urban' and 'agriculture' in modernity came to be thought of as so
strong that it is important to remind ourselves that alternative
urbanisms are possible, where animal keeping is not outlawed" (p.
37).

And yet, urban livestock disappeared in every urban agglomeration where
significant economic development took place. There was in the end
nothing fundamentally peculiar or unique about the cases discussed in
this book, and similar chapters could have been written about other
large western cities in the nineteenth century and more recent
developments in East Asia. True, a new generation of enthusiastic animal
keepers and some wealthy consumers are currently doing their best to
reverse the tide of urban development, but the evidence provided in this
book suggests rather unequivocally that the current urban agriculture
craze will in the end be as socially significant as the hippie communes
of a few decades ago. That the authors do not dare derive certain
politically incorrect conclusions from their evidence, however, does not
in the end undermine the quality of their contributions.